


To Seek Out New Life and New Fermentations

by Vermin_Disciple



Series: Where No Occult (Or Ethereal) Being Has Gone Before [2]
Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Crack, Crack Crossover, Gen, Humor, Works in this series can be read independently and in any order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-18 17:55:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7324891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vermin_Disciple/pseuds/Vermin_Disciple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Crowley makes a nuisance of himself on the USS Enterprise, while Aziraphale tries to be helpful (which mostly amounts to the same thing).</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Seek Out New Life and New Fermentations

Flying a starship wasn't nearly as much fun as Crowley had anticipated. In fact, it was mostly maths. Some days he really missed the internal combustion engine. 

"Ensign," said Lieutenant Sulu, rather sternly. 

"Oh, er, right," said Crowley, who had no idea what it was he was meant to be doing, and settled for waving his hand vaguely at his station when Sulu wasn't looking. The ship didn't crash, and Captain Kirk seemed satisfied, so Crowley considered it a win. 

All and all though, he didn't think that navigation was his thing. It was surprisingly difficult to cause any mischief from here. Besides, gold just wasn't his color. 

He'd started out wearing red, but that had turned out to be a disaster. 

Security had seemed like a grand idea when he’d first decided to join Starfleet – well, join was probably too strong a word for what he was doing, which was essentially just wearing an appropriate uniform and pretending to know what was going on. Aziraphale had actually hung around the Academy for a few years before heading into space, though Crowley doubted he’d bothered to get graded on anything. Anyway, he’d watched a few away missions and decided that Security looked like a lark – you got to hang around the important people, see a few strange new worlds, wave a phaser about: a grand time. 

Or so he’d thought, until he’d been eaten by a giant rabbit on Lepus II. And then it was a bat’leth to the head in a minor skirmish with the Klingons, followed by a swarm of flesh-eating insects, a flower that shot poisoned darts, and so on and so forth. All and all he’d been discorporated seven times before he finally decided to give it up as a bad job. Best to try something new before he gave into his daydream of strangling the ship’s CMO the next time he heard the words, “He’s dead, Jim.” 

After that, he'd tried engineering, which proved to be less lethal and more productive. Crowley had no idea how a starship worked, but it wasn’t too difficult to find something that could be unscrewed, wrenched off, or blinked out of existence, that would set off an obnoxious siren and send everybody in engineering into a panicked scramble. A confused Mr. Scott usually led to an irritated Captain Kirk, and everybody down the chain-of-command would suffer a nice residual anxiety, either out of an irrational fear that they, personally, might be responsible for whatever had gone wrong, or out of a perfectly rational fear that with all of their superiors in a bad mood, they were likely to end up in someone’s line of fire regardless of their actual culpability. 

It had been fun for a while, until he nearly blew the warp core on accident. 

Aziraphale, meanwhile, had been making a nuisance of himself in sickbay. 

Speaking of which…

A bemused ensign came up and relieved him. Crowley’s shifts tended to end whenever Crowley got bored. No one ever noticed, but then, Crowley was good at not being noticed when it didn’t suit him. 

He strolled into sickbay and found Aziraphale in consultation with the ship’s CMO. Or, to be more accurate, he found Dr. McCoy addressing a computer monitor while Aziraphale hovered nearby looking guilty. 

“This is the third time this month,” muttered McCoy, who appeared to be talking more to himself than to anyone else. “It doesn’t make any sense…”

“Hello, angel!” said Crowley brightly. Aziraphale jumped, and turned to glare at him. 

McCoy turned around as well, and looked him up and down with a raised eyebrow. “Is this a medical emergency, Ensign?”

Crowley snapped his fingers, and Dr. McCoy’s eyes went blank. “Spock is saying something logical on the bridge. Why don’t you go up and tell him why he’s wrong?” 

“I should go up to the bridge,” said the doctor, in an eerie monotone. He rose and walked out, still looking dazed. 

“Crowley!” hissed Aziraphale

“What?” said Crowley. “He didn’t look very happy. I’m sure that yelling at Spock will cheer him right up.” 

“I don’t see how that makes it any better.” 

“No, you wouldn’t. What did you do, anyway?” 

“I treated a patient,” said Aziraphale, stiffly. 

“Using some unorthodox methods, I’ll bet. A few tricks they don’t teach at Starfleet Medical?” 

“In a manner of speaking.” 

“Like waving your arms about and saying, ‘Oh Lord, put this poor sod’s leg back on.’” 

“I don’t see how it’s so different from waving these recorder things about.” 

“Tricorders,” correctly Crowley automatically. “And the difference is that Dr. McCoy understands a tricorder, whereas a miracle is, by definition, not meant to be understood.” 

"I don't see why he should be _upset_ ," said Aziraphale. "As long as people get better, why should it matter how?" 

"That's the trouble with these scientific types. They're all about the _how_. Humans are always bothered by things they can’t explain." 

"You know, back in the good old days, people knew better than to question miracles," said Aziraphale, rather huffily. 

"Didn't you once get burned at the stake for performing miracles, back in the good old days?"

The angel shuddered. "Point taken."

"Skepticism is inherent to the species; it's a feature, not a bug. C’mon, angel, let’s get a drink."

“It’s still my shift.” 

“So? I have Romulan ale. The real stuff, not that watered down Orion knock-off the NCOs have been passing around.”

“Oh, alright.” 

***

"I'm thinking of switching over to sciences."

“Can’t do the maths for navigation, can you?” 

They were in Crowley's cabin, taking another stab at three-dimensional chess. Strictly speaking, ensigns did not get their own cabins, but since it had never occurred to Crowley that he might have to share, he didn't. His quarters were also rather larger than the standard issue, and certainly better equipped in the area of liquor cabinets.

“I can,” lied Crowley. “I just don’t want to.” He moved one of his knights up to the upper section of the chess board. 

“I don’t think that’s a legal move,” said Aziraphale. “Er, or is it?” 

“Bugger if I know.” 

“So what field of science are you planning on taking up?” He took out one of Crowley’s bishops with his rook. 

“Does it matter? Whichever one I can cause the most trouble in,” said Crowley. “Hang on, rooks definitely can’t do that.” 

"You’re not thinking of trying to corrupt Mr. Spock, are you? I thought we agreed he was off limits."

"Nah. Too much work.”

Neither of them were entirely sure what to do with Mr. Spock. Being half-human might put him in their jurisdiction, as it were, but then again it might make him an abomination unto nature beyond the reaches of heaven or hell. After some debate on the subject, they’d flipped a coin.

“This is ridiculous,” said Aziraphale, and the three-dimensional chess board flattened itself down to a single level. The chessmen, though surprised, were rather pleased to discover they were now made of fine Carrara marble.

“You only did that because I was winning.” 

***

In the end he settled on botany. The Enterprise’s arboretum had never bloomed with such gusto. While Mr. Sulu had been singularly unimpressed with his skills as a navigator, Crowley’s gardening was a different matter. 

“Oh my,” said Sulu reverently, fondling the foliage of a Plutonian night lily, “how did you get it to grow this tall, this fast?” 

The best thing about growing alien plant species was that half of them bordered on sentient, which made them _far_ more susceptible to his methods. He took one vibrant blue leaf between his fingers and the lily trembled with mute botanical terror. 

“I could tell you,” said Crowley sweetly, “but it would cost your immortal soul.”


End file.
